THE SHULTZ-WEINBERGER FEUD

By Philip Taubman; Philip Taubman is a Washington correspondent for The Times.

Published: April 14, 1985

THUNDER ROLLED ACROSS the flight deck of the French aircraft carrier Clemenceau in the eastern Mediterranean. One by one, 14 Super Etendard jet fighters roared skyward and then banked toward Lebanon. Their mission: to retaliate for the truck bombings of the French and American military headquarters in Beirut that had killed 59 French paratroopers and 241 American servicemen. Until that day - Nov. 17, 1983 - the raid had been conceived and planned as a joint French-American effort to attack targets near the Lebanese town of Baalbek, a stronghold of pro-Iranian Shiite Moslem militiamen believed by the Central Intelligence Agency to have been involved in the bombings. President Reagan had authorized Navy fighter planes attached to the Sixth Fleet to join the air strike, a decision that has remained one of the better- kept secrets of the Reagan Administration. It was the first time an American President had approved a counterterrorist attack.

But the French carried out the strike alone. The American planes never took off. The exact reasons remain classified, but this much is certain: A mission championed by Secretary of State George P. Shultz, viewed warily by Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger and approved by the President was aborted because the final go-ahead order was not issued in time by the Defense Department.

According to Michael I. Burch, a Pentagon spokesman, Weinberger was not personally responsible for that decision. Some White House officials say otherwise, insisting that Weinberger tacitly agreed to have the mission scrubbed. But at the very least, the incident serves as a dramatic example of the battles that have raged over foreign policy during the last two years, in no small part because Shultz and Weinberger have disagreed on a variety of major issues. ''The clash between Shultz and Weinberger,'' says a former senior Administration official, ''and the inability to go anywhere to get disputes settled, produced paralysis in many areas.''

When the conflict goes public, as it often has, it creates an impression abroad of confusion and uncertainty in the making of American foreign policy. Within recent weeks, for example, the two men have disagreed publicly over how the Administration should respond to the shooting last month of an Army officer by a Soviet soldier in East Germany. The State Department has said that the United States would seek an apology from the Russians and compensation for the officer's family, but meanwhile, the Department has announced plans for a meeting between American and Russian commanders in Europe, aimed at avoiding such incidents in the future. Weinberger, on the other hand, has insisted that the meeting of the commanders should not take place before the Russians offer an apology.

On the face of it, the two men might have been expected to get along better. Neither had extensive foreign-policy experience before moving into his current job, and neither was strongly identified with particular national-security positions. Yet they have bickered bitterly - a remarkable display for men who are, as a former Shultz associate puts it, ''pretty buttoned-down fellows.''

A White House official tells, for example, of one White House meeting in 1983 when Shultz, frustrated by Weinberger's reluctance to apply more military pressure against Syria, said, ''If you're not willing to use force, maybe we should cut your budget.'' Weinberger, according to one of his aides, seemed intentionally to taunt Shultz about the failure of the 1983 agreement between Israel and Lebanon that Shultz had personally negotiated.

The sources of the conflict between the two men are partly institutional: The State Department's mission is to seek diplomatic accommodation, sometimes through the selective application of American military force abroad. The Defense Department, directly responsible for defending the nation's security against hostile powers, is often more conservative about improving relations with the Soviet Union and less willing to commit American forces to combat. During the Ford Administration, for example, Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger and Defense Secretary James R. Schlesinger frequently clashed along these organizational lines, with Kissinger favoring detente with Moscow while Schlesinger warned that a surface improvement in relations would not alter ingrained Soviet belligerence. In fact, there are experts who believe that vigorous policy disagreement between the two departments is both inevitable and healthy.

But far more than is generally recognized, and to a far greater degree than in the past, the differences between Shultz and Weinberger reflect very different backgrounds and temperaments and a longstanding professional rivalry. ''There is a personal edge to the disputes between George and Cap that is much sharper than previous feuds,'' says a veteran national security official. ''These guys have been rivals for 15 years.'' The competition dates back to 1970, when Shultz was director of the Office of Management and Budget in the Nixon Administration and Weinberger was his top deputy. Later, both men worked for Bechtel, a giant construction company in San Francisco, with Weinberger again in a lesser position.